In the House of the Rising Sun
By 
Legal sports betting revenue in the US has gone from $430 million in 2018 to $11.04 billion last year, i.e., more than a 25-fold increase in five years. Note that revenue means total bets minus total payouts, so that $11.04 billion is the net loss to legal sports gamblers in America last year. Given the growth curve, I’d be surprised if that figure was less than $15 billion in 2024, which would mean that Americans legally wagered something like $150 billion on sports this year! This works out to about $600 wagered on sports by the average adult, but of course the word average is extremely misleading in this context, since the median amount wagered on sports by American adults this year is no doubt zero, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the same number wagered at the 75th percentile of the population as well. Looking at consumption patterns among other consumers of addictive products, this no doubt means that many millions of American adults are legally wagering many tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars on sports every year, and the growth curve is still pretty much going through the roof.
BTW all the growth and more has been in online betting (revenue from sports betting at physical sites declined in 2023).
My friend Steve, who pointed me to these numbers, comments:
This is not profit, which is harder for the gambling companies to get since they’ve got non-betting expenses on infrastructure, advertising, and customer acquisition freebies. For societal effect though, this is the number that matters. It’s the money going away from guys on their couch. Guys who have careened Trumpward, fwiw.
This is part of the Crisis Of Young Men story, and probably a sizeable one. For whatever reason (poor impulse control until later in life than we’d like, general despair at prospects, etc.), these guys are inveterate pressers of the pellet bar. Weed, games, gambling, porn, they hit them all at much higher rates than everyone else. We’ve put a lot of pellet bars in immediate reach. Gambling is probably best of those at sucking away their money.
You don’t have to be a prohibitionist about any of this to wonder where it’s all heading. There was always an anti-prohibitionist argument that prohibition didn’t even work to reduce consumption of whatever it was being banned. If people wanted it, they’d get it, was the argument. It is probably past time to give up that line of thought. We’ve run the experiment on weed and gambling, and we’ve gotten a lot more weed and gambling. And the original Prohibition really did reduce alcohol consumption, though it hardly eliminated it. Accept the tradeoffs, don’t deny them.
I remain a non-prohibitionist, as the costs of prohibition in lives and injustice are huge, but you know, I worry.
I’m coming around to the idea that while outright prohibition would probably do more harm than good, somehow getting back toward a regime in which it would be much more difficult to gamble legally than it is now may well he worth a try. Call this the “discouragist” rather than the prohibtionist position . . .
This general approach is something that has, for example worked extremely well with cigarettes over the course of the last couple of generations. Obviously the big challenge with gambling is that technology has now ensured that the 91% of the US population with a smartphone (yeah I didn’t believe it either until I looked it up) is walking around with a sports book in its collective pocket.